Edit: Tribe is NOT overpower and does not need to be nerf.
o_O some say that 100% increases are definitely too high, but there are ways around this. I’ve known in my own games to go as high as a whopping 700%.
But considering there are few weapons that can penetrate that, it would make sense to approve this criticism.
Agreed, the NEC’s suffer due to tribe.
Actually I think the game suffers.
Nerf Tribe.
On a continuum of pilots and credits the matches between races (x against y) should be roughly a 50% trade off wins/losses. This should be the standard for making new races.
Could we build 10 - 20 maps from 5,000 to 100000 credits and test each race against each other? Let everybody try to build the best fleet for their race against a given enemy race (Federation VS Tribe) and record the win/loss ratio?
Fed vs Tribe 5000
Fed vs Reb 5000
Fed vs Alliance 5000
etc…
Fed vs Tribe 10000
etc…
To really make that work we’d need to
Tribe vs Fed 5000
Tribe vs Reb 5000
etc…
Tribe vs Fed 10000
Looks like a lot of work…
Nerf Tribe.
-50% shields is hardly a nerf (for cruisers) when shields are mostly used for resistance
-50% armor is doing them a favor, because armor is an outright waste of resources
Tribe is different enough that you have to equip different weapons than normal to have any chance of beating them, a terrible detriment to generalist fleets. They win most “mirror” matches by the pure virtue of being tribe; they’re strong enough to turn what would be soft counters around into wins. In short, you’re destined to lose as another race unless you outplay the hell out of them. They’re throwing off the general sense of balance and squashing more creative fleets.
The hull bonus has got to get cut in half, or more. Tribe fleets don’t worry about defense when adding another cheap howitzer adds 200hp to the craft. They have those crazy repair modules, let them rely on those for once.
No they don’t, Tribe got the worst repair module in the game. You have to take into account what they are repairing. Other race repairs armor, which absorbs way more than 490 damage due to resist. With 70+ armor this can mean 490 worth of crit damage, or 16333 damage on average. Where as Tribe repairs hull, which never gets to use up it’s 1050 because repair module breaks first, they get no more than 500 out of each repair on average at best.
Repair will only be WORST for tribe with lower HP, because this means the repair module itself will have even lower HP. They will never be useful no-matter how much you nerf the Hull. The only way to compensate is to put on more shields.
If Cliff seriously want repair to be usable for Tribe, then repair module needs to break last (and balanced by significantly lowering hull bonus).
This also makes the -50 penalty a much bigger penalty, because 70+ armor with Tribe repair is just outright broken.
“No they don’t”, what?
Yes, repair gets poorer as it takes damage. So do the ships of those poor lesser races. We’re talking about significantly re-balancing a race. If it means buffing the repair module to have more HP or to repair faster, fine.
As of now, Tribe spends nearly nothing on defense and that absolutely has to change. Repair modules are one such expenditure route.
Otherwise they’re buying more guns.
Armor breaks before repair. Order and Nomad has Armor, Tribe don’t. No other race has a practical use for repair.
One way to make repair useful for Tribe is the change the order of when repair breaks (like the camouflage).
So skipping the detail, I will suggest either
Hull boost down to 80%, or
Hull boost down to 50%, all repair modules break last.
Everyone forgets the six legged ones. We will have our revenge, oh yes…
Like the scrambler, I don’t think camouflage is operationally affected by damage whatsoever. That’s probably an oversight, to be honest.
It’s also got 440 hitpoints, if that’s what you intended.
I’m of the opinion that every craft, tribe or not, should be sporting some kind of armor out of necessity - much like how players presently equip near everything with a shield. The current mechanics are really holding us back in that regard.
That is becasue of the shields being so broken in my mind. One they shields allow other craft to pass though it, and it will never rebuild once it has been dropped. And once it starts to take damage the stupid repair modul will fix it FIRST before anything else.
I feel that armor is better because simply there is no way a craft can get between it and then ship, it can be rapaired faster than shields. but like shilds if the armor is used up it can not be rapared. BUT with armor you can have a much higher penitration vaule than ANY non-modded shield.
I didn’t forget, Alliance isn’t good with high armor (relatively speaking). They have 1 hull that has 12%, but it’s only has a starting power of 8 (you can’t have the micro hull/engine 1/repair module/missile). Yes they can still get 70+ armor but requires skipping out on the 1 missile to draw aggro with.
Anyway this is what happens the most often.
I think the problem is, because repair cannot repair itself, it will inevitably die the fastest.
So a few ways to improve it is to allow for self repair (for all repair systems), double it’s health, but decrease it’s supply to 850.
That’s a depressingly narrow definition of “good”. Doubly so, because that’s probably an accurate assessment.
Another thing to look at is the repair rate/damage curve. Repairs go slower once the module is damaged.
2 repair modules help mitigate repair module death syndrome.
As said above though, Tribe stats do not force a player to use the repair module with the same level of need as other races have to use shields and/or armour to avoid losing ships very rapidly. Conceptually the tribe sacrifice shield and armour for hull, and the tribal repair system gives them their regenerative defense element (as per shields in other races).
So make repair modules immune to to damage-based performance degradation (for me this is a general change that needs doing regardless of the Tribe situation) and reduce the hull bonus. Any takers at 25% hull bonus? At this level you are certainly forced to devote at least 2 modules to defense like most cruiser designs would have 2 shield generators.
Only problem is if a new balance is struck on Tribe repair-hull bonus balance that brings the race back in line with the mainstream is the Tribe then gain a unique racial handicap. Their regenerative defense element has a finite lifespan - once those supplies are gone their ships will fall very quickly to any attacks. Are there any GSB battles where this matters? Challenges yes, possibly the upcoming campaign too.
What is Cliffski’s view on Tribe balance?
Even with multiple repair modules the average life expectancy of them seem to be around 30% - 50% supplies used. The co-op tag can easily overloads any repair attempts. By lowering their hull bonus, they will have even less of a chance to use repair.
Also, recent developments in both the SAC and NEC suggest that Tribe needs 1 shield, so as to not get slaughtered by dual rocket fighters.
I personally think Tribe won’t be worth using below 50% hull bonus, and that’s with a serious repair module buff. They have too many limitations regarding what they can and cannot do.
repair modules can not or will not repair each other, I have used 2 repair module on a lot of my ships and NEVER see one go green to get repaired.
ALSO if a armor repair and normal repair modules are on a ship shouldn’t the armor repair module be used up BEFORE the normla one? I have seen many times were my normal repair fixes armor instead of the armor repairer. This is a mistake in the coding i belive, or cliffski did not think that people would be putting both on one ship.
If you can reduce their overpowering hull bonus mechanic, you can also reduce their inherent weaknesses. A 25% armor penalty would easily allow tribe to rock out +12 armor on cruisers (in actuality, you only need 8+, since lasers are the bigger threat). There are many ways to balance tribe, but the simplest thing to do would be to just play around with the numbers. I personally think 50% would be just about right, but anything in between would still be way better than what it is now. We could even find the optimal point stochastically, as a community, by running tournaments with modded numbers. Which brings me to my next point:
We should balance these things out as a community. I’ve said this before, but I really believe this is the way to go. You’ve asked us to balance test your Ancient’s mod so that we can use it in a tournament, but you must realize that that would be useless; your race wouldn’t see much play because tribe would still dominate. A much as we respect and appreciate everything Cliffski does, we need to admit that he can’t do everything. There simply isn’t enough return on investment for him to do extensive balance testing, because GSB is already a small community, and we are at best, like, a dozen strong who actually play competitively and who actually care that tribe is overpowered.
You could even decide to do things unilaterally. Mod up some tribe numbers, buff up some underused weapons and make a tournament of it. I’m sure everyone who plays SAC and everyone here would support you and participate.
Dang, a small community. But the law of damage dynamics states that if even the strongest weapons rarely leave a dent, then its not worth having such a bonus. It probably has been tested, but that 100% bonus, so I suspect it is, is clearly too strong where I stand. 80% would be a rather good and decent nerf.
Strange, I’ve never had this problem with multi-repair module mounting Tribe designs (or indeed any of the 2 standard repair systems). I had to pinch my self when I saw your reply and ran a quick scenario with some 3-pack Utopia’s and the Tribal repair units fixed each other quite nicely.
However, depending on the type and amount of damage incoming repair modules can fall into a sort of ‘yes, yes, I’ll fix the shield generators once I’ve finished scrubbing the plasma stains of the pleasure deck. Don’t bother me again!’ syndrome. Once a module is selected for repair the system removes damage until it is at 100% hitpoints, and then selects the next most damaged module currently not under repair for fixing. In other words I think the mechanic is first come first served, there is no prioritisation table to tell the system that repair modules are more important to fix first before that micro crew module and to switch to another module part way through a repair.
Again, I think this is an example of the first come first served mechanic making the system perform in a way that does not give the maximum lifespan for the vessel it is in.
Now, you could argue this is ‘realistic’ and the mechanic has been purposefully written this way! There are many examples from history of how systems (human, mechanical and otherwise) perform in sub-optimal ways when placed under extreme stress.
I’d quite like to see the Tribe get a penalty to their shield resistance. Nothing too huge, but enough to let cruiser beam fire penetrate even their most expensive shields.
What harm is there in leaving the Tribe as is? I’ve been sent challenges from “Tribers” and found some are impossible for my fleets. I simply delete them, tell the other player what a fantastically annoying challenge it was, and move on. I think it will balance itself out in the long run. See, once people begin to realize their challenges will not be accepted because it’s a Tribe fleet, the’ll either continue to be ignored, create a balanced fleet (like the game scenario), or start using another race.
The benefit of leaving it as is, is that it gives some a chance to win a scenario when they struggled with another race. Besides, the struggle makes the reward so much sweeter. I know I was pretty elated the first time I beat the Tribe fleet, it caused me to rethink my strategy a number of times. If we balance EVERY race then soon the only difference will simply be the way ships look. Personally, I prefer the diversity.
Tribe has been around since last December, and that certainly hasn’t happened yet.
In fact, I can’t remember any direct post-release balancing at all for Tribe, and that’s pretty distressing.